A journey through the MICROBE project: making data FAIR with EMBL-EBI resources

Complex life-science projects generate several kinds of data, and it can be hard to decide which resource is the right home for each. EMBL-EBI resources are closely linked and support deposition of many data types so that data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR): BioSamples holds information and metadata about biological samples; the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) archives nucleotide sequence data and experimental information; BioStudies describes studies, links data held elsewhere and stores supporting data that fit no specialised archive; and MGnify analyses microbiome sequence data. Depositing everything in a general-purpose repository such as Zenodo can be convenient but may compromise the traceability of relationships between datasets, samples and experiments and the documentation of provenance. Following the EU-funded MICROBE project, which used BioSamples, ENA, BioStudies and MGnify for its complex data structure, this webinar shows the advantages of EMBL-EBI resources for data registration, submission and retrieval, and how planning experimental designs and expected outputs in advance helped organise early registration and connect the project's data types across resources.